


Troubled Youths

by Ellinor, Zafaria



Category: Wizard101
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 07:58:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18890461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellinor/pseuds/Ellinor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: Inspired by @Ellinor 's headcanons for magic corruption. A re-posting of the original version (some grammar edits apply)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ellinor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellinor/gifts).



**Storm Surge**

     He feels sparks skittering under skin, the metallic taste of electricity sharp on the tongue. There are spiny pricks of current striking nerves and vessels and flesh with such passion and devotion to the stinging result.

     "This is what it means to be prodigious," he says with candor and intelligence to his friends, his audience. They watch as he whips up small vortexes in the pond by the school. He grins in a brief flicker like the lights giving way to the howling winds in a storm. 

     The pain is a sweltering kind and it hides under the dermis, zigzagging and webbing.

     He is always in pain. Gifted, talented, blessed. However they choose to count him, he is an excellent diviner, the most scarred one to be known. Feats of magic that display ingenuity grant him scars. They rip his skin the color of wet earth every which way. The scars glisten in flashes of light, metallic and perilously jagged. They are raised and uneven, and the glares of pain like to congregate under these spots; lightningbolts hitting the same megalith over and over.

     When he inhales, each small wind he sucks down spirals in his lungs, forming a tornado that stirs his insides and twists them in further agony. He fights ringing, the reverberations in his skull, pounding the walls and begging for escape.

     He spins his finger around. The air surrounding it swirls with force as the pain races up to his forehead. It is exacerbating and insufferable, chased by the melting heat thousands of degrees hotter than the balance in his body.

     He shakes. Beneath him, his legs wobble like thin trees in swift winds. Control must be maintained, his act of restraining the billowing cyclones and tumultuous skies inside him is fleeting.

     He is not truly the progenitor of the brilliant magic he uses. It is something beyond, something hungrier. Insatiable, it hammers at every wall of his being, the piercing of eardrums and quick tearing of flesh.

     It is the same mystic that fissures his skin and leaves the scars. Gold and bronze and silver like the white-hot light of a streaking sky, they sear him. Immense squalls topple him, a cliff pulled down into the sea by the maelstrom. He is dogged, crawling on his abraded knees and trembling hands. He shakes more violently than the air in an anvilhead.

     The lightning clouds his eyes. Or maybe it is the fog before the storm becomes genuinely dangerous.

     He crawls, searching for the safety of the lip of the sidewalk, as he edges his way closer. He sees in the distance some salvation, the hopeful beaming of a lighthouse cutting parallel rays to the jagged sky. The power inside has been hungry to be liberated for a time now. Perhaps he did always know that once he started falling, he would tumble uncontrollably. He trembles and extends his arm towards whatever it is, the desperate horn sounding on a ship filled with water to the bow. It will go under soon.

     He is shaken by a convulsion, and the collapse is finished as he lay on the pavement, spreading like a slow surge.

     "This is... what it means... to be... prodigious." He exhales slow yet forceful gusts of breath.

     The electricity overtakes him in waves. Chaotic rumbling of the clouds in preparation for the rainstorm, the rain finally falls, burdened and full. It falls from his rigid face to the sidewalk.

     The gunshot calls ring in his head, agitated at his concessions to weakness

     This is what it means to be prodigious.

⛈


	2. Rabbit Heart

**Rabbit Heart**

     In the woods, the grass is overgrown, entwined with vines, and it ensnares the other living beings as they dart between foliage. The grass tries to inveigle ankles and necks. All plants and nature start out with good intentions. That's what he’s told. 

     He is amicable and friendly, finding ease with growing a conversation, planting a flower in his listener's heart with every action. A theurgist, he thought tending to others was his vocation. A small responsibility expected of him. His mind drifts to the first friend he revived. He didn’t even chance the spell, he just invoked it. Naturally.

    “I am so grateful for you. You are truly one of the few good wizards,” the friend had said. The boy himself was astonished by his proficiency, the ability to mend the other student back from the grim clutches of untimely expiration.

    Perhaps, more so, the boy was shocked to find bumps on his forehead, nestled in his hairline like baby birds in the comfort of sticks and twigs.

     With every benevolent sacrifice, every selfless reflection of power, they grow ad become proud antlers. A display of his contributions and service to the others.

     At first the antlers are benign, and serve in equally as kind a manner as the boy they are attached to. Birds perch on them and sing a song of graciousness and thanks. On long forest walks, the pine needles and mosses hug them, knowing the theurgist is one with their being. The quiet sounds of a bubbling creek, the crickets serenading on either side of the river, make him feel as tender and vibrant as the tree leaves.

    Politely, without encroaching too much, the antlers expand, with the forkings and buds of new crowns. With each helping, each offering of attendance and generosity, they lengthen.

     They are achromatic. Blanched and sun-bleached until they are the color of a gentle dove’s wings. Or, the color of the rabbit bones laying gingerly on the forest floor after the flesh is reclaimed by the sediment.

     The antlers have branched a lot now. They are heavy, spread and large like those of a real deer. No, something bigger. A moose. An elk.

     He feels they may as well be carved out of marble, jabbed into his forehead.

     What once brought him joy, a blush on his piebald face when he spoke to his friends of it, now brings excruciating pain that drums at the top of his skull. It grows slowly, the languid cementation of pebbles to a larger, more cumbersome stone. The antlers are uncontrollable, peaking higher like a defiant vine overwhelming the brick face of a cottage.

    It is on one of his long, canopied walks that he pauses to sit on a circular path of dirt beneath the trees. His head is heavy. It pulls down on his shoulders and knees, his neck bowing away from the pressure and force.

    He wails a moment, as he feels the gravity of the antlers fracturing something beneath them. The frontal plate of his skull cracks away with simplicity. Blood streaks in his hair.

    Gentleness and cordialness feed the antlers, but the bone-white edifices still require sufficient space to grow. They are not meant to adorn mortal heads, no matter how high they are held.

    He is helpless as he waits for the thorn bushes and trees to entangle him. The slow curling vines on the trunks of trees nearby will wrap him with their tissue-paper flowers, he hopes. The lichens and moss watching from the nearby rocks cannot spread fast enough. A mess of wax-leaves and climbing plants, he will be shrouded eternally.

    He is one of the few good wizards.

❀


	3. Living Dead Girl

**Living Dead Girl**

     Cracking teeth show the slow disintegration of dentin as the water and shape is siphoned from what was once sturdy. They grey in her jaw, converging on the same ashen color of her parched gums and depleted skin, an unwavering extinction.   
  
      "It won't be long now until you are the most skilled necromancer I’ve ever taught!" She recalls a foggy memory of the disembodied voice of her instructor exclaiming how dedicated she was. It was early in her study. Back then, she was ambitious and trying. Then she became scraping and desperate. With each fierce and dire casting she makes, she decays.

     It starts slow, visually imperceivable. A few strands of greying hair fall out, and the surficial cracks appear on incisors, barred in laughter before things dull. She swallows and it tastes of sewage water trickling down the back of the throat.

     It has transgressed beyond that.

    She is stiff in a permanent state of rigor, the cartilage between her joints running out and the tendons that pulled her muscles fraying. Her insides rot and twist, her intestines coiled like an eel at the pit of her stomach.

     She is gaunt and spinal, the rounded ridges of her vertebrate poke against her robes and stick out above her collar. 

     When she cranes her neck, the jagged mountain ridge centered in the back of it rises, and rattles. She collects unsteady retching glances from the hordes of other students milling about the school. The millions of eyes, processing her form peeling and raw like a clove of garlic.

     She is nothing but unamenable.

     They avoid her face. It is sinusy, with swollen bulging eyes that admonish shifting from their perch in her sockets, the grey skin below sunken blacker with exhaustion. The tiredness pulls her skin downward, and it sags off her face; roomy once the contents below evaporate and corrode.

     _Palor mortis_  pays her a threatening visit every now and then. Each time, it takes a hock of flesh with it, sapping color and leaving exposed sinew. It sloughs off in spongy chunks. The skin peels off, in anatomical and exacting layers, thin braids of white fat visible, blood vessels hanging freely like loose cords.

    As elastic ligaments snap overviolently, living precipices give way and accept their grinding and tormenting fate. 

     She feels the rattling of the undead as they shake the coffin sealed shut, darkness encapsulating them. Visions of hell and dirt and suffocating cloud her mind, the ghouls beckon her across the Styx to their land. And she is afraid of her craft and what it implies and confronts.

     Her dried tear ducts produce no saline, but she collapses on the ground clutching her temples anyways. Pressing her palms into the sides of her desaturated face, she tries to stop the flesh from flaking off in grotesque pieces mangled with arteries and cords. The verdant grass she falls upon withers, sanctity ruined by the putridity that she expelled. It is the sticking of innards like cobwebs to her ribs, released in raspy exhalation. Her lungs are shriveled, she’s sure of it. Every breath is loathsome, and she feels like she is being dragged by the toe to the bottom of murky swamp waters by a hidden Leviathan, deeper, and deeper still.

     The jaws of the beast slowly close around her waist, pressure gradually changing as the hinges tighten. There are no wounds, and no sluice left to bleed from her flesh when it is punctured, but she still feels the lethargic sickly hot drip. 

     She inhales a rickety, stale breath.

     It will not be long now.

🕷


	4. Fire and Flame

**Fire and Fury**

      Smooth fluid flames claim dominance. Skin blisters and bubbles where it is grazed by the relentless heat. The flames are an incendiary, wreaking havoc on organic things wherever they scuttle.

      She too, is an incendiary. She is angry over everything, and nothing. The small mistakes of others, ignorance, the fizzling out of a spell derailed by a lack of focus. Every instance causes her fingers to tingle, the heat gently making its way up her arms, engulfing her entire being in anger and unrest.

     “You are passionate, yet you must exert more control. Your emotions consume you,” her teacher forewarned her. There is a way to amplify ability with feeling, while keeping concentration. Her frustration is stashed away, like matches in a box waiting for the correct moment to be struck. When the feelings are lit, released in a second of passion and fury while battling, the results are explosive.

     The results also consist of burn scars, warped patches of pink skin that look as if they are stitched together to form her entire being. Every emblazoned product of magic, fueled by vehemence, scorches her. Behind the seams, boiling rage, brewing in a pot, releasing steam in small bursts in the crucial heating before the whole vessel spills.

     Her friends abandoned her long ago because of her rasping nature. Alone now, she fights creatures of hellfire and spite. She screams incantations at them, and her brow sits low and creased on her forehead. Bronzed irises spark, waiting for the correct instant to ignite.

     She duels, ferociously, and releases her ire in an infinitesimal second of catharsis, the flares extending from her palm. They scald and scorch the enemy, with all the wrath she pent up inside herself.

     As the enemy crumbles into a pile of soot, she grimaces. She feels as though she is inhaling nothing but dust and smoke, like an inferno surrounds her, protruding from the earth. A grating sensation ricochets through her ears, the whining hinges of the door closing on an incinerator, with smoke climbing up the chimney of the potbelly. Embers in the stove proclaim hissing and sizzling remarks, shifting as they dehydrate and become molten.

     The flames wag up and down, condescending. They hold a rage she never thought was attainable, consuming everything in their vicinity. They demonstrate how to channel emotion and passion, without getting burned.

     The fire is unforgiving for her mistakes.

     She had stowed away grudges and hatred for all the mistakes others had made towards her or in her presence. Now, it is her turn to experience the same unpredictable, rising insolence.

     She dances now, her feet feel like scalding embers. As she panics, her upset and anxiety provide impetus for a rioting fire, and her dwindling composure feeds the hungry flames that force hot air and smoke into her face. She is red now, flushed to match the flames. Her legs sweat, and are so hot that perhaps flesh is melting from her too.

      There is the crackling of skin as is splits under the thermal menace. It is slow and agonizing as each layer unhurriedly splits and peels, and the next layer follows its predecessor in ashen suit.

      The pull of the wick draws the flames closer to her body, charring her, a slick oily residue left on the crisped patches. Her frantic movements agitate the flames.

     The flames wrap around her muscles and tug them, causing spasms. Curling fingers are like a paper rolling in on itself as the front of the fire spreads from a tarred corner. Her being is no longer hers.  
        Her emotions are consuming her.

☀


	5. Dream A Dream

**Dream A Dream**

     A dreamer who lost control of the fantasy, the narrative twists around him and constricts like a great serpent extracting the final breaths. The pen is sentient now, and the careful hand of the writer crafting the story is unneeded, irrelevant.

    When he predicts the weather or the disasters, when he keenly sees the hurt of others and protects against it, they all utter in a stupor.

    “What a talent you have! It is remarkable!”

    With each prediction, each observation and forewarning, he gained further sight. The future became demystified and fog cleared. He glimpsed further events and relayed them to his peers, the other beings bound only to the plane of the present.

    To have this sight, he needed eyes.

    They appeared after each apparition was elucidated, when the words floated weightlessly in the air to be absorbed by the others. Aside from the two he came into the world with, his first eye was golden and on his forehead.

     He is mottled with the things now, like a slab of granite is flecked with quartz, luminous appendages staring out over the world. They are the colors of decaying leaves, stone blocks, swirling cypresses, famous rivers.

    Covering every inch of his being, the eyes only want to gaze.

    He sees all and at all times. The visions flash across his mind, lens flare that sears the brain in white-hot torment. He tries to fixate on the real and the physical but the eyes are too aloof and progress in giving him more foresight of things unspeakable and horrid. Grotesque monsters and outlandish creatures chasing beloved friends, ripping them apart, a club falling on a skull with a tremor. The ground opens up and swallows the corpses every time.

     There are many imaginings and they occur so fast in such rapid succession he cannot warn, only wince and gasp in sympathetic discomfort as bones are broken. The bottom lids of his many eyes jut up, shrouding themselves from an imagined pain. The blood mentally flows from heads and guts.

     With each one, the eyes sharpen and clarify. They hone their accuracy and the future becomes dependable, exactly as it was envisioned to be. No action new, no development unaccounted for, none escape the glaring of the eyes. Every unfolding chapter has already been watched.

      The eyes give him a transient vision of himself. He is broken in two by the hands of a giant, the eyes widening in suddenness before a loud snapping. The sound is like a great structure of marble falling as the land shifts from beneath it, echoing throughout his head.

      Instead of fleeing, the vision is replayed, inescapable. As the eyes run through it again, it gets more detailed, more shuddersome. Back cracking, eyes bleeding, ribs crunching. An expression of woe is static on the slack-jawed empty face of the conjurer. His gangly limbs are limp as he is tossed to the ground.

     He tries to blink, to close his eyes, but only the two originals that share the same detached grey will comply. He cannot dictate the others.

     He trembles and feels like he is dropping, like the altitude escapes him as an unreal fissure opens up in the space between his feet. The earth upheaves and rocks. He falls endlessly in the depths, only able to perceive darkness that shades his many eyes as tendrils grasp at him. His stomach is vehemently agitated and he feels it will rupture like a molten mountain, or fissure like the crust of the terrain.

     He sways unsteadily like buildings rolling in seismic waves, the inevitable collapse being gauged, timing planned for a slow ungraceful fall.

     What a talent he has.

♕


	6. Freeze-Fracture

**Freeze-Fracture**

     Icicles carefully sharpened and dropped on the unsuspecting at the right moment will always have piercing capacity. The overhead hanging stalactites of frozen water become far more sinister when they threaten to break free and plummet. No one can predict their plunge.

     At one point, she proved her valor in battle. A thaumaturge was thought to only ever take the hits, not deal them. She had polished steel armor for this exacting task. But a vicious blow, cautiously prepared, emanated from her and decimated the opponents.

     “I didn’t know you could do that! You’re really spectacular!” her teammate lauded. She felt worth and confidence in that moment, a pride that would swell. A drop of water seeping into a sidewalk crack, expanding as ice when the temperatures are suitable.

     Nails and teeth sharpen and harden, carbonized into the clear and bitter of diamond.

      Blood slows and cools too, hope and earnestness evaporating from it, leaving the empty vessels shivering along.

     This would craft a wizard of a different source. The feelings flowing out from her are not the same temperate and heartfelt sentiment. Gripping cruelness obsesses with how people ever doubted her unyielding strength and rigidity. In phases, the same thawing nature of the old her could be caught briefly; but like a snowflake cusped in warmer hands, it melts away in seconds.

     She watches as her fangs and nails turn bluer.

     They are vulgar and crystalline, scraggly things meant for attack. When they grow, she is a helpless watcher, standing at the bottom of the mountain as the avalanche rolls down and wipes away people and houses and trees.

     But she does not feel as pure and clean as the snow. There is no sun that illuminates her like the sun on a fresh powdered floor, and she is not inviting enough for there to be meek footprints, traces of others within herself.

     Sometimes she blacks out, the scene behind her eyes as dark as the winter sky. Even if it is the afternoon, it befuddles, conceals the truth.

     Another student tells her to stay supportive, not aggressive. She is out of line, breaking the silently endured rules of dueling and consistency. A child ruining the perfection of an icicle on a roof corner, snapping it at the base with their mitted, grubby hands. Every school has their strengths. It is wise to stay to hers, so there is no aspect left unsecured, no flank left unguarded.

     This initiates an overwhelming boiling.

     Her cool demeanor dissipates, and she cannot handle the criticism. Sight is fleeting, hiding away behind a lens of white, snow-blindness from a tenacious reflection. She howls, and bares her claws and fangs like a ravaging wolf galloping through the snow. The other student is a freezing deer, too slow to lurch out from under the trajectory.

     When she regains her senses, there is water-thinned blood splotchy on her face. A pinkish pool is at her feet, but it will not expand and evaporate. The ground is much too cold to facilitate the cleanup of a wretched scene. It is unhelpful, even to those as bleak as itself.

     She must confront who she has grown into. Drop by drop, the remorse and hate solidifying and constructing the pointed icicle, callous and frigid.

     She used the accessories for harm. Like the icicle, she hung fragile in the balance, beckoning for someone to come along and swipe at her. She fractured and fell. And she bit at him the way a brisk breeze gnaws at degloved fingers and unwrapped noses, staining with the same rosy red.

     She worries how long until she herself shatters.

     She didn’t know she could do that.

❄


	7. Great Vindicator

**Great Vindicator**

     To be just, to be fair and conscientious with good cause, is one of the rarest gifts. A sorcerer, on their own, comes to judgements; and then Judgement itself weighs their austerity in their calls at the end. Too often, choices are blinded by selfish desires.

     “I cannot afford you anything. But at the very least, you are righteous,” one of the villagers tells him. His verdicts are confirmed as righteous by all he helps, appreciative of his ability to come to quick decisions that benefit.

     He makes choices to save rare books over money, toss pricy and powerful artifacts to ward against the evil they attract, and in this case, help unsightly villagers instead of leaving them.

     His graciousness does not go unnoticed. It is a point of pride.

     Somewhere along on his journeys, golden feathers started to erupt from his shoulderblades. After every precise and exacting decision, they emerged further.

     They are now full, lustrous wings, beating air with condemnation and importance. He mars the back of his clothes with holes, so that his wings may operate.

     Virtuous and true, like the benevolent spirit’s heart as it is weighed on the scales, the sorcerer is lightweight, a frivolous carry by the wings. They flutter and move him along. Role as a hero magnifying, he moves swiftly to the next point of judgement, delivering his ruling.

     Perhaps, there is a way these talents can be used so he may gain something too. A good decision should benefit not just those he is helping, but also himself, he figures.

     He resumes his assistance. Not without a price, though.

     He accumulates all natures of things. They give him gold that glares like his wings, clothing with no holes in the back, heirlooms that he cannot see the value of.

     He still collects. Good help doesn’t come without a good price.

     Every item he accepts, the wings bluster and flap, almost as if they are warning, angry.

    Judgement takes its time. The weighing of the soul, and the decisions crafted by the spirit, is not completed after every individual choice. The rulings must accrue over time, like the boy’s coins, or his many robes.

    Well, indeed, a choice is made when the villager’s dirty paws extend, holding their last bits of income they fish from their pockets. And a choice is made when they run into their shack to grab their ancestor’s ancestor’s jade vase, and come back cradling it in their arms, tearful as they hand it away. And a choice is made when they take their hats off and hold them sheepishly in front of themselves, before offering him the sun-battered, splintering article that represents their labors and efforts.

     Every time, there is a choice. And he chooses to accept. To take the coins or the vase or the hat, and place it in his pocket. The gifts are not taken in good faith. He knows they will end up in an attic, the hat as a bowl for dust, the coins losing their sheen, and the vase dishonored under cardboard boxes.

      Judgement observes and does not appreciate. A wayward wizard, all in its very name and practice.

     The wings respond to Judgement above all.

     He travels in his swift way, wings cutting the air. They are preparing to lower the gavel, strike it against the pulpit with a life-ending thud. He does not know.

     The gilded feathers give way over the edge of the world.

     He falls, through the dark skies, blind and imbalanced. He will never be returned to stability, and continues to violently roll through the unending chasm, nothing left to reach out to.

     Yes, at least he is righteous.

Ω


End file.
